Tom has subsequently worked closely with several artists, Idris Khan & Alex Hoda, in the roles of production / studio manager & head technician. A move to Bristol in 2013 facilitated an unforeseen opportunity to teach himself the skill of plastering, thus creating surfaces. He then discovered Lime – an old and awkward material & re-discovered Colour. He currently uses his camera to discover & document surfaces. He’s also collecting lead, to cast with & then photograph in some capacity. Things are fluid, the practice is coming slowly.
An idea…
Firstly, imagine.. a small stone walled Victorian factory room / space, now functioning as a shitty damp cubicled communal loo. There are photographic images on the walls.
Secondly, imagine.. A wooden pallet on wheels, built up into an enclosed box, using chipboard fixed on to a rudimentary frame, with a basic door and no roof. It’s got photographic images in it. (Let’s call it the ‘Wheely Art Box.’) People interested in seeing the photographs can enter the box.
The photographic images will be be of the spaces they are to be shown in. More specifically: of the surfaces, the details, the intricacies of each space.
The work will attempt to cross pollinate the spaces through a kind of continuous information teleportation function, a conduit loop. Photographs of each space will be available to view continuously within each others realm. Images of Chipboard, on battered old Loo walls, Images of battered Loo walls on Chipboard. Like they’re in cahoots on a knowing harmonious material level. Sharing each other. The Viewers will be invited to scrutinise each space in reality (material reality texture on offer here) and via the means of it’s representation – through the photographic copy. The simulacra.
The work will present elements of camouflage, the intimacy of banality, repetition of texture, and of course the championing of deterioration and dereliction. The work is site specific, though there may be an opportunity for the Photographs and the Wheely Art box to live on in another time, another space, proclaiming the joys of itself and the Victorian loo somewhere else..
Maybe,
It’s on wheels.
